hitsudan2000: A Sino-Japanese Brush-Talk Toy

🌍 https://hitsudan2000.pages.dev

This is a small toy that helps Chinese speakers and Japanese speakers communicate with each other. It "translates" your input into a hybrid text built on a skeleton of Chinese-Japanese shared kanji, glued together with a sprinkle of English, so that both Chinese and Japanese native speakers can roughly make sense of it.

The idea isn't originally mine, though. Someone once posted online that, having studied a bit of Chinese, they noticed Chinese and Japanese share a lot of nouns but have completely different grammar. So they suggested borrowing a few words from English to string those nouns into sentences. It turned out people really could understand each other and hold simple conversations.

I remembered this while brainstorming ideas for a vibe coding project. It also reminded me that, long ago, Chinese and Japanese people couldn't speak each other's languages but both used Chinese characters, so scholars from the two countries would communicate by writing kanji back and forth. This was called 筆談 ("brush talk"). So I took the Japanese reading of those two characters and named the project hitsudan2000 .